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WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

businessinsider.com

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Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#81

Post by UncleEntity »

bluepizza wrote: post #63
fallingknife wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Losing money doesn't destroy wealth. It just transfers it from one place to another.

If you buy a stock for 100 dollars, and due to a series of bad results which led to price adjustments, the stock is now worth 1 dollar, you lost 99 dollars. Nobody else picked up those 99 dollars. Asset depreciation is a fundamental concept that you should be familiar with, as it influences several aspects of your personal finance: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/depreciation.asp

> Nobody else picked up those 99 dollars.

Except the person who sold the stock for $100.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#82

Post by epolanski »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #69
IshKebab wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Uber's losses are deliberate at this point, like Amazon's lack of profit. If you look up their losses per journey it's something completely trivial like 50c. Uber's customers are not that price sensitive so if they really did want to make a profit they could probably just raise their prices a little bit.

It's actually profitable https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000154315123... But I think the consensus is that (unlike Amazon) there is no more scale for them to reach which would make their business model profitable enough to justify the valuation - their only route to large profits is to destroy the rest of the competition and raise prices. "On Monday morning, an Uber from Manhattan to JFK Airport was $…

Aren't Amazon revenues almost flat with only AWS still posting double digit growth?

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#84

Post by voakbasda »

pcurve wrote: post #38
lvl102 wrote: post #10

Thank goodness it never made it public (first time around). Can you imagine the capital destruction for pension funds?

It still managed to destroy $25billion the second time around, so I would say plenty of damage has been done. Shame of the investors for giving this sky high valuation through SPAC.

I imagine the only shame the investors feel is that they couldn’t pump up the share price higher, so they got an even bigger windfall before screwing over everyone that would be left holding the bag.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#85

Post by bluepizza »

UncleEntity wrote: post #81
bluepizza wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy a stock for 100 dollars, and due to a series of bad results which led to price adjustments, the stock is now worth 1 dollar, you lost 99 dollars. Nobody else picked up those 99 dollars. Asset depreciation is a fundamental concept that you should be familiar with, as it influences several aspects of your personal finance: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/depreciation.asp

> Nobody else picked up those 99 dollars. Except the person who sold the stock for $100.

Person A holds 1 stock, valued at 100. Person A sells 1 stock to person B. Now Person A holds 100 in cash, and 0 in assets.

Person B now holds 0 in cash, and 100 in assets.

Fast forward 5 years. The stock price has crashed to 1 dollar.

Person A still holds 100 in cash and 0 in assets. Person B holds 0 in cash, and 1 in assets.

There was no transfer of 99 dollars back from Person B to Person A. Person A's holdings were invariant because they don't own the stock anymore. The losses brunt by Person B were not transferred to anybody else.

Money doesn't travel back in time.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#86

Post by tinyhouse »

I wanted to love the concept but couldn't really. I couldn't afford renting a whole office so just had the cheap day pass that lets you use the facility. It's like going to a cafe with the benefit of leaving your laptop while you go to the bathroom or wonder around. Nothing like an office. I want a dedicated desk and office chair, external keyboard and monitor, a quiet area, conference rooms that don't charge you by the minute, etc. We Work is nothing like that.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#87

Post by emacsen »

bluepizza wrote: post #63
fallingknife wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Losing money doesn't destroy wealth. It just transfers it from one place to another.

If you buy a stock for 100 dollars, and due to a series of bad results which led to price adjustments, the stock is now worth 1 dollar, you lost 99 dollars. Nobody else picked up those 99 dollars. Asset depreciation is a fundamental concept that you should be familiar with, as it influences several aspects of your personal finance: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/depreciation.asp

Unrelated to this is the distinction between money and wealth.

The challenge for a company like Weework is that it's hard to identify what wealth they generate- at least for me.

In other words, what are they making (goods) or doing (services) that provides value to the world (wealth).

I suppose they'd say that their core value is making it easy to rent space quickly. This is certainly providing some value, but I hardly think it's one that's heavily differentiated.

I bring this up because the conflation of money and wealth is so often what gets people in trouble. Decoupling the two lets us examine what the value of a company is, at its core.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#88

Post by detaro »

shp0ngle wrote: post #73
lvl102 wrote: post #10

Thank goodness it never made it public (first time around). Can you imagine the capital destruction for pension funds?

I'm not sure if you are ironic or not. What's bad about pension funds? People need, you know, to live off something when they are old. The old model "we have a lot of kids and they will take care of us" no longer works as people have no kids...

I'm curious how the parent post makes you think they think pension funds are bad thing?

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#89

Post by hiatus »

shp0ngle wrote: post #73
lvl102 wrote: post #10

Thank goodness it never made it public (first time around). Can you imagine the capital destruction for pension funds?

I'm not sure if you are ironic or not. What's bad about pension funds? People need, you know, to live off something when they are old. The old model "we have a lot of kids and they will take care of us" no longer works as people have no kids...

They are saying that it would have been bad if pension funds had exposure to wework stock.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#90

Post by boeingUH60 »

kibwen wrote: post #67
pcurve wrote: post #42

"He's back with a new startup that raised $350 million from the VC giant Andreessen Horowitz in August, 2022 — its biggest check ever " Someone once said, SV values bigger failures than small success. Fail big.

And most importantly, fail upward. The fact that this legendary con man has ultimately suffered no consequences for his actions demonstrates how the market is fatally irrational.

The VCs backing him are in on the con to. They want to pump and dump their stake on the real market.

SoftBank was the real con person in the WeWork saga…Neumann just left them holding the bag, and they couldn’t successfully dump it on retail investors or sell it to a greater fool.

The reason VCs continue to back people like Neumann is they have succeeded many times (e.g, Uber, Postmates, Lyft, Chamath Palihapitiya’s SPACs, etc.).

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